New project: Alpha analytics

Published Jan 7, 2017

I have a new project! It’s called Alpha. Since the last project I started is called
Epsilon (for events), I decided to call this Alpha for…
analytics! Alpha is an extremely simplified version of Google Analytics. I know
very little about website / browser analytics, so building something like this is a great way to
learn.

It’s up and running right now. If you’re reading this post on the Misframe site, you’ll see this
snippet on the bottom of the page:

It’s not great, but it’s a start! The time series are generated using an Epsilon query. Because
Alpha stores raw events in Epsilon, I get to slice and dice this data any way I want. Everything
is stored using lm2.

Note 1

Did you know Googlebot runs JavaScript? I ran the equivalent of this SQL on Epsilon:

Note 2

Another version of this project started as a way to track my own website usage. I used a browser
extension to inject the tracking code into every page I visited. I ended up finding a security
issue in VividCortex this way 😬 . Make sure you’re using
CSP policies in your applications!